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Thursday, 13 February 2014

Israeli Soldiers Torture and Abuse Palestinian Children

Israel’s Occupation Forces Have Learnt Well from the Nazis

Fighting 'terrorism'

I have to confess that, immune as I am to stories of the violence and brutality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, I found the programme below, made by Australian TV, shocking. I’ve been on the streets of Derry and Belfast when British soldiers attacked demonstrators but compared to the film below, the Occupation of the North of Ireland was a genteel affair.

Israeli’s have learnt well from the holocaust. Most Israelis turn their heads away or bury them in the sand, as not knowing is a comfort. But when Israelis put in a uniform, with a few exceptions, they behave like the savages of the SS. If it were not for the genocide, they would be peas in a pod, and to some in Israel the Nazis are a model of how to conduct an Occupation [see Israeli Judge Ben-Itto 'We must learn from the Nazis']

Perhaps the most shocking revelations concerned the use of electric shock torture on children and a child who had food placed on their head and genitals with an Alsatian dog ordered to eat it. There was a time in Israel when, because of their use in the concentration camps, that Israeli police were not allowed to use such methods.

Daniella Weiss, a settler leader, summed up the settlers claims that the West Bank is their land. ‘This is Jewish land. God gave it to the Jewish people’. The military are there to enforce the settlers' claims. Weiss may have been working in cahoots with the master butcher himself, Ariel Sharon, but it was the Israeli Labour Party (Mapai) which first established settlements in the West Bank.

As Israel Galili, of the militarist ‘left’ Ahdut Ha'avodah told Haaretz on April 18, 1972:

“Our right in Gaza is exactly like our right in Tel Aviv. We are colonizing Gaza exactly in the same manner in which we colonized Yafa. Those who doubt our right in Gaza should doubt our right in Tel Aviv as well.”

Together with Yigal Allon, Rabin and the rest of the war criminals who ran Mapai, they began the occupation regime. It was one of the founding fathers of ‘left’ Zionism, a co-founder of Mapam and Ahdut Ha'avodah, the party of Poalei Zion, who became the most ardent of the settlers’ supporters. I refer to Yitzhak Tabenkin, who founded Kibbutz Meuhad.

It is no accident that some of the most important founding fathers of Labour Zionism – Allon, Galilee and Tabenkin – were the ones who determined from the outset that the West Bank would never be given back. From there it was a simple path to the abuse and torture of children, a practice that should bury for all of time Israel’s claim to be the ‘only democracy’ in the Middle East.
Tony Greenstein

I never thought I would see it. A mainstream TV programme, this one made by Australian channel ABC, that shows the occupation in all its inhuman horror. The 45-minute investigative film concerns the Israeli army’s mistreatment of Palestinian children. Along the way, it provides absolutely devastating evidence that the children’s abuse is not some unfortunate by-product of the occupation but the cornerstone of Israel’s system of control and its related need to destroy the fabric of Palestinian society.

Omar Barghouti has spoken of Israelis’ view of Palestinians as only “relatively human”. Here that profound racism is on full show. There are, of course, concessions to “balance” – in the hope of minimising the backlash from Israel – but they do nothing to dilute the power of the message. This is brave film-making of the highest order. It is an indication of quite how exceptional this film is that it has cornered Australia’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop, into expressing her “deep concern“. That’s the same Bishop who last month doubted that the settlements in the West Bank were illegal. - See more at:

Israeli forces in the eastern occupied Jerusalem village of al-Eizariya were caught on video on Friday posing for trophy photos as they held a wounded, handcuffed Palestinian child in a stranglehold.
The disturbing video, shot by Rami Alarya was published by the Independent Media Center (IMC), however that publication’s website, which regularly documents Israeli abuses in the village, appeared to be down.

The International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) which translated IMC’s report provided this description and analysis:

The soldiers assaulted the child during clashes that took place in the [al-Eizariya] town, east of occupied East Jerusalem.

another trophy photo - German soldiers did the same when invading the Soviet Union

One of the soldiers tried to push the cameraman, Alarya, and his colleague, Amin Alawya, away from the scene, and was yelling at them, “Enough, enough…. go away… what do you want…”
Medical sources said the soldiers shot the child, Yassin al-Karaki, 13 years of age, with a rubber-coated metal bullet which hit the 13-year old in the leg. After he fell, the soldiers began assaulting and abusing him.

The attack took place after soldiers, who hid in a building near the Annexation Wall in the Qabsa area, ambushed a group of children, and one of the soldiers opened fire on the children.
Several soldiers then attacked and assaulted the wounded child before kidnapping him.
The soldiers took pictures of themselves with the wounded child, and one soldier picked up a Molotov cocktail from the ground, while the child shouted in Hebrew, “it’s not mine, it’s not mine”, and a soldier responded, “it’s yours, it’s Ok … it’s yours”.

One of the soldiers was holding him in a chokehold, and was mocking the child by imitating wrestling moves while other soldiers took pictures, although the child was barely able to breathe.
The soldiers then placed the child in their jeep, while one of them was still filming the incident.
Trophies

In his book Goliath, The Electronic Intifada contributor Max Blumenthal writes that such so-called “trophy” photos have a long tradition in many military forces, including Israel’s.

Blumenthal recalls a series of such photographs released several years ago by Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group which documents testimonies of Israeli soldiers while protecting their identities:
Among the disturbing shots culled from Facebook pages belonging to young Israelis was a photo of four smiling troops towering over a blindfolded preadolescent Palestinian girl kneeling at the point of their machine guns; a pretty female soldier smiling winsomely beside a blindfolded Palestinian man cuffed to a plastic chair; two soldiers posing triumphantly above a dishevelled corpse lying in the street like a piece of discarded trash; a soldier pumping his rifle in the air directly behind an older Palestinian woman tending to pots on her kitchen stove; a soldier defacing the walls of a home in Gaza by spray-painting a star of David and the phrase, “Be Right Back”; troops in the Gaza Strip playing with and posing beside corpses stripped half nude in acts of post-mortem humiliation; a young soldier mockingly applying makeup from a Palestinian woman’s dresser. The Facebook pages were so replete with documents of humiliation, domination, and violence it seemed that army basic training had been led by Marquis de Sade.

Blumenthal sees these images as documents of a “colonial culture in which Jewish Israeli youth became conditioned to act as sadistic overlords toward their Palestinian neighbors, and of a perpetual conquest that demanded indoctrination” beginning “at an early age” and continuing “perpetually throughout their lives.”

The latest shocking images from occupied Jerusalem are proof that this ugly tradition persists.